How will UX and Design thinking influence how executives fund product development in the future?
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Design thinking has been around for a while. UX has been around for a long time.
Human-centered engineering was being talked about even when I went to university a long, long time ago, but it seems that the world has cottoned on to the whole idea of discovery.
UX
In UX, one of the patterns is Lean UX from Joshua Seiden and Jeff Gothelf. There’s a couple of different versions of design thinking out there. One from Stanford and one from IDEO.
All pretty much have the same ethos:
How can we really fill the funnel with work in product development when we don’t have that much confidence that we’re going to get the value?
Treat ideas as assumptions to be validated
A lot of the time people build business cases for some piece of product development, that they’re going to earn so many millions, that they are going to build it in this market. All sorts of wonderful things.
Really clever executives treat a lot of the ideas as assumptions that need to be validated.
In particular, the Lean Start-up started this maybe 10 or more years ago by saying what is quality if you don’t know who the customer is?
One more time: what is quality if you don’t know who the customer is?
The idea was why would you build a high quality, full-fledged product? Why would you fill your funnel with all that stuff when actually we haven’t validated whether people actually want that idea, whether they want that product?
